Cease Fire

ARTICLES ABOUT CEASE FIRE BY DATE - PAGE 4

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday welcomed Syria's pledge for a ceasefire and called on the opposition to honor the agreement, as a U.N.-backed ceasefire aimed at halting more than a year of bloodshed in Syria appeared to be holding. "China welcomes the government's relevant decision, which will help to ease tensions," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website. "China also calls on the Syrian armed opposition to immediately cease fire and implement Annan's six-point proposal.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian rebels are ready to stop fighting the moment the Syrian army withdraws its tanks, artillery and heavy weapons from opposition areas, a spokesman for Free Syrian Army commanders inside Syria said on Saturday. "We cannot accept the presence of tanks and troops in armored vehicles among the people. We don't have a problem with the ceasefire. As soon as they remove their armored vehicles, the Free Syrian Army will not fire a single shot," Lieutenant Colonel Qassim Saad al-Din told Reuters by telephone from Homs.

Angalia Bianca grabbed the young man by the jacket and affectionately shoved him against the window of a currency exchange. "What were you fighting about?" she demanded. "Tell me. " She fussed over his bandaged hand as he told his side of the tussle at a nearby alternative school. Ignore it, she urged. "This can turn into something else," she said. "What if someone got a gun?" It was nighttime on this rough strip of Howard Street, and Bianca was fervently attending to her job as an outreach specialist for the anti-violence group CeaseFire, trying to pull local youths away from gangs, drugs and crime.

Tio Hardiman had 10 siblings. Six didn't fare too well: One succumbed to pneumonia at a very young age. Two died in drug-related deaths. Two are in jail. One is strung out on drugs. But four of Hardiman's siblings have fared considerably better: One is an attorney. Another is a playwright. Another owns a beauty shop. And another is a blues musician. As for Hardiman, he's the director of the anti-violence initiative CeaseFire Illinois. Over the weekend, he organized evening marches in several Chicago neighborhoods terrorized by young men shooting up their communities.

Nearly three months of fighting between Saudi Arabian troops and Shiite Muslim rebels along the Yemen border has ended, the Saudi government announced Wednesday, declaring victory two days after the rebels offered a cease-fire. Saudi ground forces and warplanes have pounded Houthi militants since the rebels killed a Saudi border guard and infiltrated a string of villages in early November. The fighting, which stoked fears of wider regional chaos, drew the kingdom into a sporadic 5-year-old conflict between the insurgents and the Yemeni government.

To get them to talk, the teens had to be separated from their environment, plucked from South Side streets carved up by imaginary turf lines and bused to a place where violence was unacceptable. And so about 50 Fenger High School students found themselves in the Loop on Saturday, on the fifth floor of an arts center, surrounded by colorful abstract paintings and adults from the Chicago anti-violence group CeaseFire. What led them here was the videotaped beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert, which revealed to the world, in brutal detail, an inexplicable feud between Fenger students from two small swaths of Chicago.